Has Ed Miliband anything to offer beyond fratricide?

Wednesday 11 January 2012 11:56 BST

In the spotlight: Ed Miliband at Bethnal Green Academy prior to his part relaunch speech yesterday

A Tory Cabinet minister admitted to me earlier this week that he prays every day for Ed Miliband to remain leader of the Labour Party. It is an exaggeration to say that the Conservatives' hopes of a clear majority at the next election rest on his slender shoulders. But it certainly helps David Cameron's case that the man who will be his principal opponent on polling day is increasingly regarded as unelectable.

Yesterday the Labour leader relaunched his strategy with a toe-curling interview on Radio 4's Today programme and a speech at the Oxo Tower of mind-blowing blandness. In his breakfast-time duel with John Humphrys, Miliband simply refused to address the central question: that the voters have already made up their minds about him. It was none other than Iain Duncan Smith, in an interview in 2001 with Gyles Brandreth, who first acknowledged the pitiless speed with which such visceral judgments are made. "It's the next four months that count," said IDS. "If the wrong colours are applied to my slate, they will be there for ever." And so they were, with brutal consequences: his defenestration as party leader in November 2003.

But Miliband was having none of this. Confronted with the damning criticisms of his leadership now made by Maurice Glasman - the former guru who once held an "Access All Areas" VIP pass to his suite of offices - Ed's pale response was: "I don't agree with him [Lord Glasman] when he says it's all crap." Well, no. But with gurus like this, who needs enemies?

The speech itself, heavily trailed as a significant statement of strategic course correction, has been attacked for its lack of policy detail. In this respect, I think Miliband is quite right: more than three years away from the likely date of the next election, it would be fatuous of him to start releasing choice nuggets from the Labour manifesto. What counts is the message, the over-arching narrative, and it is here that it has all gone terribly wrong.

First, Miliband refuses point-blank to accept that Labour spent too much in its last years of office, and that the scale of the deficit inherited by the Coalition reflected Gordon Brown's failure to translate the UK's 63 consecutive quarters of growth into stable government finances. Second, the Labour leader blames the delay in fiscal recovery on the Coalition's cuts which "bled demand out of the economy". And yet, third, having criticised George Osborne's frugality, he warns that the next Labour government will have to preside over its own austerity measures: "We will have to make difficult choices that all of us wish we did not have to make." Confused? You will be.

One of Tony Blair's many strengths as he plotted Labour's return to office as Opposition leader between 1994 and 1997 was an unshakeable awareness that the electorate's anxieties must be addressed before any progress can be made. This remained at the heart of his politics until - almost literally - they carted him out of Downing Street. Blair always took the view that Mondeo Man's default position was scepticism of Labour's competence and motives.

In contrast, Miliband offers a carnival of self-congratulation and the absolute confidence in his own rectitude that comes from true irrelevance. As I argued on this page in September, he "misinterpreted the success of one bold decision - his undoubted courage in taking on Rupert Murdoch - as a validation of his entire world view". And indeed, there he was, in a Guardian interview on Saturday, declaring: "Look, I am the guy who took on Murdoch That was a decisive thing to do. I am the guy that has said the rules of capitalism as played in the last 30 years have got to change."

Blair, as a vote-seeking missile, was interested in credibility and persuasion. Miliband is interested in creeds and retrospective vindication. Last November, I engaged in a civil but impassioned argument with one of his smartest aides about atoning for fiscal imprudence in the past when you don't think there was any such overspending. "Is it your view that we should apologise for 'debts racked up by Labour' whether it is true or not?" the aide asked rhetorically. The problem with Miliband and his team is this: they think the voters need to sort their ideas out, and pay attention to Ed. For them, it is not the Labour Party that has a credibility problem. It is the electorate.

One of the main political threads running through 2012 will be the plotting against Ed Miliband, the manoeuvring of Yvette Cooper and other shadow cabinet members, and the only question that really counts in this context, which is: could Labour reverse the terrible error it made in September 2010 and install the elder Miliband in the job that ought to have been his in the first place?

Yet there is another way of looking at this question which has less to do with the party's squeamishness and fear of regicide than with Miliband's own sense of destiny. It is painfully obvious that he is not a very good party leader and that the public has already grasped this simple fact. He is not a great rhetorician, strategist or policymaker. His ideas amount to an unremarkable repackaging of Fabian socialism for the iPad generation. What is Ed, or was Ed, ever good at? What is, or was, his idée- force?

The answer is horribly clear: he was good at sabotaging his brother's chances of becoming Labour leader. He was really, really good at that. He got the job done. Is that not the embarrassing problem with which Labour and indeed everyone else is wrestling? It's not that Ed Miliband lacks a mission - rather that, having fulfilled it many months ago, his work is now complete.